Advertising's Share Of Time Spent With Media Continues To Erode

Editor's Note: The original version of this story incorrectly referred to share of media revenues instead of share of consumer time spent with media. This version has been updated and a correction has been published here.

Advertising's share of time spent with media continues to erode, falling to a 45% of total consumer time spent with media in the U.S. in 2020, according to this year's edition of the Global Consumer Media Usage & Exposure Forecast from PQ Media.

While advertising continues to remain the dominant share of media revenues vs. consumer spending on a global basis, it also continues to erode, falling to less than two-thirds (65.9%) in 2020, according to PQ Media.

"Many of the emerging countries with large populations like China and India are woefully behind the developed markets in digital access penetration," PQ Executive Vice President-Research Director Leo Kivijarv explains about the differential between U.S. and global shares of consumer spending.
"For example, a little less than half of China’s population doesn’t own mobile phones, and of the 600 million that do, they only reached 50% share of smartphones this year, or 300 million of the 1.3 billion people."

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Whatever the case, the trajectory is is clear that consumers are increasingly paying for media directly vs. receiving ad-supported media.

PQ Media won't release explicit consumer media spending figures for another couple of weeks, but in 2018, it estimated 

The average American consumer spent $1,344.55 in 2018, an increase of 3.6% from 2017.

The average global consumer spent $325.25 on media in 2018.

8 comments about "Advertising's Share Of Time Spent With Media Continues To Erode".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 21, 2020 at 6:55 a.m.

    Joe, you can't take ad spending in the media and assume that it equates with time spent with ads. To  get the latter, you need to know the average ad load per hour for each medium and then factor in some educated guess of the relative difference in attentiveness between editorial content  and the ads. I've doe this for our Media Dynamics subscribers and the percent of time spent with ads is considerably lower than what you would surmise based only on ad expenditures----because most people pay less attention to the ads.

  2. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., January 21, 2020 at 7:07 a.m.

    @Ed: Nobody said it equates.

    The analysis looks at the share of time people spend with ad-supported media vs. consumer-supported media and the trajectory shows people are spending proportionately less time with ad-supported media over time.

    That seems important and consequential to track.

    If people are spending less time with ad-supported media, there is less of an opportunity to even see those ads.

  3. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 21, 2020 at 7:27 a.m.

    Joe, the headline states that advertising's share of time spent with the media is declining---"eroding", yet the analysis seems to utilize uses ad spending, not time spent, as the basis for this conclusion. The implication, though not actually stated, is that people are devoting less time to ads---or are seeing/hearing fewer ads. Taking the U.S.as a frame of referrence what's actually happening is a slow but steady growth in the amount of time people spend with the media which results in slightly more ads being "exposed" per person each year.

  4. Mike Donatello from N/A, January 21, 2020 at 7:44 a.m.

    Respectfully, I'd have to agree with Ed. Looking at the 2020 bar in the second chart and comparing it to the graf that reads, "while advertising continues to remain the dominant share of media revenues vs. consumer spending on a global basis, it also continues to erode, falling to less than two-thirds (65.9%) in 2020," it's pretty clear that the proportion on which the bar is based is ad spend, while the chart title is "time spent." Two very different metrics.

  5. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., January 21, 2020 at 7:51 a.m.

    @Ed and Mike: That's true, the headline does say that advertising's share of time spent with media continues to erode, because it is the truth.

    People are spending less time with ad-supported media as a percentage of the time they spend with media.

    You can interpret that anyway you want, but for people like me who think of advertising as a supply-and-demand marketplace of human attention, it means there are proportionately fewer opportunities for advertising to win a share of the attention people spend with media.

  6. Carl Langrock from Allscope Media, January 23, 2020 at 2:38 p.m.

    Is the use of the word revenue, in the following sentence, a typo? "Advertising's share of time spent with media continues to erode, falling to a 45% share of media revenues in the U.S. in 2020, according to this year's edition of the Global Consumer Media Usage & Exposure Forecast from PQ Media."

  7. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., January 23, 2020 at 5:55 p.m.

    @Carl Langrock: I think you're right that could have been worded better. Let me take a crack and if it's substantive, we'll publish a correction.

    The analysis divides the share of time consumers spend with media into two sources of revenues: money coming from consumers and money coming from advertising.

    A 45% share of the time consumers spend with media is based on revenues media derive from advertising. 55% is derived from revenues that come directly from consumers.

    Let me check on how that correlates to the actual share of media revenues that come from advertising vs. consumers. 

    I'll update with a comment here, and in the original story and via a correction based on what I learn.

    Thanks for the catch.

    Joe

  8. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., January 23, 2020 at 6:36 p.m.

    @Carl Langrock: PQ Media won’t release it’s 2019 estimates for consumer spending for another couple of weeks, but based on last year’s data, the actual revenue shares are slightly higher than what I reported:

    $1.3 trillion for advertising and $1.8 trillion for consumer spending, or a 42% / 58% split.

    In any case, I worded our coverage incorrectly and I’ll update the story and publish a correction too.

    Thanks for flagging it.

    Joe


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